Tuesday, December 12, 2006

As someone who had the pleasure of spending many, many hours in the lesbians women's committee in the European Parliament, I am used to listening to well meaning, yet rather ignorant people talking about prostitution.

I even had the joy of reading a report which suggested that the European Union should make prostitution illegal across the EU.

Why?

Why can't a consenting adult charge someone money for having sex with them? Why can't someone who wants to pay someone for sex do so?

Prostitution has been around for longer than democratic politics. Soliciting for prostitution has always been illegal. It has been pushed onto the streets, making it unsafe for most concerned. And yet it is still here.

I think it should be legal. I really can't see why it can't be regulated, with prostitutes paying tax and their clients can ensure that the women they are sleeping with are safe because they have regular health checks. These women (and men) can come off the streets and into a safe environment, and the need for pimps would be removed.

Also, one thing which is regularly mentioned is people trafficking. I notice the Tories put some caring advert about highlighting girls trafficked from Eastern Europe. Surely if they really cared about stopping this they would:

1) Impose some kind of border controls between EU countries. Whilst open borders facilitate legal trade it does, by nature, facilitate illegal trade to a great extent.

2) Remove the market for these women forced into prositution by having a legal market. If prostition is not a crime, then criminals will not get involved.

4 comments:

What you say is perfectly reasonable if one assumes you are talking about educated people who don't give a damn about using their genitalia to pay for new shoes etc. It's rather different when one considers a)the majority of prostitutes are women b)most of them are under the control of evil pimps c)many of them are drug addicts and are "forced" into it to fund their habit d)most are poorly educated and probably don't realise that there are alternative methods to earn cash e)it's a dangerous "profession" - look how many are being murdered at the moment

The reason I think prostitution should be made legal is so women can get off the streets and so the need for 'protection' and 'pimps' is removed.

Whilst many of us would not want to sell our bodies for money, some people can cope with that. And some men want to pay for sex. Most of us do it for free, let's face it. I've been to a cheesy nightclub on a saturday night - It's not hugely different with some of these girls to some guy driving past and them climbing in.